Todd Unger
Chief Experience Officer
American Medical Association
United States of America
In 2017, when Todd began his tenure in the newly appointed role of Chief Experience Officer at the American Medical Association, one of the main questions being asked within the organisation was exactly what constituted an ‘experience’.
With no recognised official definition, Todd created his own - "Customer experience is the seamless integration of product, marketing, digital commerce, community and customer service to acquire and retain members” - and promptly set to work to deliver on this vision for the benefit of the AMA and its members.
Alongside trying to shift their approach from service to CX, Todd’s strategy has also been to encourage organisational change and to redefine the metrics being employed at the AMA. He helped develop three key overriding measurements for the organisation to measure the success of its work - membership, audience engagement and brand recognition – whilst creating a strategy to deliver on aspects related to CX, commerce (i.e. better encouraging membership, specifically online), audience and data analytics.
Shifting the mindset away from being a traditional contact centre was key for Todd; starting up a CX operation dubbed “CXOne” which enlisting help from the organisation’s long-timer contact centre leader to lay out plans for what becoming a CX leader would entail. Between them, they devised a short- and long-term CX road map with well-defined metrics, driven by data and a Voice of the Customer (VoC) programme.
The VoC programme quickly identified some key sources of friction for AMA members, discovering thatover half of contacts involved log-in issues online, something that previously would’ve been resolved on an individual basis by the contact centre team, but which had never been examined from a root cause perspective.
Todd and the AMA’s vision have come to the fore during COVID-19. In the first five months since the pandemic, nearly 4 million physicians, healthcare providers and patients have accessed the AMA’s COVID-19 resources. The organisation’s CX efforts have helped establish AMA as one of the country’s most trusted voices, keeping the focus on data and science.
Todd has overseen the completion of nearly 30 CX initiatives across the AMA since the launch of our CX One programme in 2019, whilst also finding time to introduce new channels of communication, such as its daily COVID-19 Video Update, which Todd hosts.
Over the past few years, I’ve been a vocal advocate for how to operate in what I call the “Age of Experience,” which requires a new kind of leader to orchestrate the seamless integration of the key elements of experience—product, marketing, community, commerce and service.
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